What’s the first thing you do after beating a super hard game? If you said anything other than “do it again but make it way, way harder for no reason” then you’re probably pretty well adjusted. I can’t say the same thing about challenge runners.
The challenge run is a tried and true archetype of video on gaming youtube, and it’s one that I enjoy partaking in quite a bit, actually. It essentially involves playing through the game while setting arbitrary restrictions upon oneself in order to impose an additional challenge. In a game like Dark Souls 3, for example, these can be as simple and straightforward as only using a certain weapon type, to as ridiculous and difficult as beating the game without ever getting hit by anything, or without ever using stamina (a notably important feature).
What makes these so fascinating to me is the second layer of metagame, that being the interest economy of social media. As more and more people cover the same ground, these challenge runners find themselves in an arms race against one another, as they perform more and more ridiculous and complicated challenges in an attempt to impose further restrictions upon themselves to make the game harder, and therefore to attract more interest.
At the same time, it’s fascinating to me to watch these people, who seem to me to have infinite amounts of patience, a feat I could personally never accomplish, actually manage to top themselves every time. It’s also a cool way to experience and learn about aspects of the games that I wouldn’t have ever known otherwise, as very often these runs will be required to engage in incredibly niche or hidden mechanics in order to succeed at all, and the community is always very supportive and helpful.
